A Writing Life with Órfhlaith Foyle

Course Summary

This 6 week course is aimed at and will benefit beginning  writers and emerging writers through writing practise, reading writers (contemporary and non-contemporary), how to build your writing life, discover/develop your writing voice and guard your writing time. Writing in service to the story, experiment with poetry and narrative prose, voice and narrative distance

Participants will create and work on their own short stories, poems, pieces throughout the workshop series. They can email their work to the facilitator for critique during the six weeks. Both group and individual feedback on writing tasks within each two hour session and feedback via email for individual writing work.

Writing, poems as well as short stories from various writers – including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Elaine Feeney, Tommy Orange, Sayaka Murata, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Marina Tsvetayeva, Anton Chekov, Alan McMonagle.

Course Outline

Week 1

What is a writing life? How to start writing with the life you have. Truth and Imagination What do you want to say? Begin with the first sentence to a short piece. Creative writing tasks – how the writer’s life informs the writing/ what form short story, poem, or hybrid?

Week 2

First drafts versus ‘perfection’ A study of ‘first works’  and ‘first publications’ by contemporary/non-contemporary authors. Sound and rhythm in your writing. What are you drawn to as a writer?  Writing Tasks – reading aloud, placement of words, flow and counter-point. Poetry and rhythm, Prose and rhythm.

Week 3

A writing space and time. Learn to create time for writing. Belief in your work. Discipline and structure in your day and in your writing. Write in service to your poem, your story etc. The first line leads to the first paragraph to the next. Facing a blank page. Get out of your own way  and write.  Voice and narrative openings to a story. Writing challenges/ tasks.

Week 4

A writer’s seam. Following from work on Voice and Narrative – what does your Character want? POV and narrative distance. Fictional truth of your words. Character and Conflict. Atmosphere, tension/suspense. Writing tasks on character and scene creation.

Week 5

Accepting Writers’ Block. Writing something. Filling up your mind and senses. Creative writing tasks – understanding writers’ block. The other side of a writing block.  Writing dialogue, setting narrative pace, laying subtext, moving the story onward. To outline or dive in?  Creative writing tasks – mini outlines, asking questions of the story.

Week 6

Recap of the previous weeks. Reading your works. Information on submitting your work.

Who are you writing for? When do you know your writing is ready to submit?

Course Outcomes

By the end of this workshop participants will have observed and developed a working knowledge of the writing life. Writing tasks will have honed and challenged their writing voice. Each participant will have benefited from in-depth practise of writing according to their own passion and drive. They will have studied writing techniques and experimented with breaking or twisting them. They will discover and discuss what a writing life means to them, how to survive Writers’ Block, and how to write a story, poem etc that follows a true line from its first sentence.

Órfhlaith Foyle is a short story writer, poet and dramatist and lives in Galway. Doire Press published her third collection of short stories Three Houses in Rome September 2023. She wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia, adapted from her own short stories. Both received full BAI funding and premiered on Newstalk Radio in October 2021 and 2023. Her fourth collection of short fiction will be published by Doire Press in 2027

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.